The present invention relates to an internal crosspiece, especially a front crosspiece, of a vehicle.
The invention finds an advantageous application to all types of vehicles, whether they are land, marine or airborne vehicles, and more especially to motor vehicles.
In a general way, motor vehicles are equipped with a front internal crosspiece, situated under the trim panel of the dashboard. This crosspiece fixed, at each end, to a pillar, constitutes a member for reinforcing the passenger compartment, able to resist the impacts possibly occurring upon an accident.
Furthermore, dashboards feature a large number of different pieces of equipment which are most often arranged independently of one another under the trim panel. This is the case especially for the components allowing air-conditioning within the vehicle. This results in the dashboard being heavy and taking up a great deal of the available space.
In order to remedy this drawback, it is known to provide a front internal crosspiece of tubular shape, able to constitute at least one duct for the circulation of an airflow for ventilation, heating and/or air-conditioning of the passenger compartment of the vehicle.
These known crosspieces also serve, in certain cases, as support for a certain number of equipment items and/or of interior fixtures of the vehicle, such as the steering column, pedal mechanism, instrumentation cluster, fuse box, airbag device, central consoles, etc.
To that end, the crosspiece is equipped with a plurality of fixing lugs onto which the various pieces of equipment are fastened. In practice, the crosspiece proper and the fixing lugs are produced by welding of tubes and of pieces of stamped sheet metal, or by moulding from magnesium, aluminum or composite fibre.
It should be noted, however, that the crosspiece thus described constitutes a complex component requiring tooling which is highly complex and therefore expensive.
Hence, the object of the present invention is to propose an internal crosspiece of a vehicle, especially a front crosspiece, which is intended at least to provide a fixing for items of equipment of the vehicle, and, if appropriate, circulation of airflow, a crosspiece which it should be possible to produce in a much more economical way without the various functionality aspects of the crosspiece thereby being affected.
The solution to the technical problem posed consists, according to the present invention, in that the crosspiece is formed by an extruded profiled section defining at least overthickness regions for fixing the equipment items.
According to one particular embodiment, as will be seen in detail later, the invention will make it possible, in a single extrusion operation, to produce both at least one air-circulation duct and regions of overthickness of material in which the piercings and tappings necessary for fixing the equipment items will be formed.
The present invention also relates to the characteristics which will emerge in the course of the description which will follow, and which should be considered in isolation or in all their technically possible combinations.